New Intel SDK Aids Media Application Developers

Intel made a bunch of announcements at the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) show, including a new software development kit (SDK) for media application development.

Intel made a bunch of announcements at the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) show, including a new software development kit (SDK) for media application development.
At SIGGRAPH in New Orleans, Intel announced a new tool for
simplifying the development of hardware accelerated video applications,
the Intel Media Software Development Kit. The new SDK provides a single
interface to optimize performance and accelerate video applications for
processors and graphics chipsets.

Intel officials said media applications from developers such as
Avid, Corel, Cyberlink and Nero will gain improved performance on
future Intel platforms, like the previously announced Larrabee graphics
architecture, without recoding.

The Intel Media SDK is an advanced software development tool
designed to help media developers access hardware acceleration for
video codecs. The tool gives media developers a standard API for
creating video solutions for professional and consumer uses. It also
provides optimized routines for delivering maximum video performance on
a variety of platforms, as well as improved productivity for
development teams through greater efficiency. And the SDK delivers
built-in future proofing of video applications with support for
upcoming platforms.
Meanwhile, also at SIGGRAPH, Intel made available version 2.2 of
Intel Threading Building Blocks, which the company says is the most
widely used high level programming method for parallelism. Intel TBB
2.2 maintains the functionality and platform support of previous
versions and adds numerous feature and performance improvements,
including full support for the lambda capabilities of the new C++ draft
standard, C++0x, and more flexibility for independent software vendors
(ISVs) to redistribute with applications using Intel TBB. Autodesk Maya
and Epic Games Unreal Engine are among the applications that will be
reshipping some or all of Intel TBB 2.2 to support ecosystem
developers, Intel officials said.
In May, Intel began shipping its Intel Parallel Studio,
a tool set designed to help Windows developers write parallel computing
applications. James Reinders, director of Intel Software Development
Products, called the studio an on-ramp to parallelism for C/C++
developers using Microsoft Visual Studio.
And in a third SIGGRAPH announcement, Intel made a move to bolster
education and experimentation in PC game development, by announcing its
sponsorship of the Dare to be Digital game development contest and
Phase 3 winners of the $1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest.
In conjunction with the Intel Academic Community, Intel is sponsoring
the University of Abertay Dundee's Dare to be Digital contest by
providing hardware and software tools for the 10-week game development
competition for students. Additionally, Intel and Epic announced
winners for Phase 3 of the $1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal
Contest recognizing breakout modifications for Unreal Tournament 3.
Phase 4 of the contest closes on August 31.
More information on this can be found at http://software.intel.com/sites/billboard/.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.